What Went Wrong

How Romney and the Republicans lost the Reagan Democrats.

After its second defeat at the hands of Barack Obama, under whom unemployment has never been lower than the day George W. Bush left office, the Republican Party has at last awakened to its existential crisis.

Eighteen states have voted Democratic in six straight elections. Among the six are four of our most populous: New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois and California. And Obama has now won two of the three remaining mega-states, Ohio and Florida, twice.

Only Texas remains secure — for now.

At the presidential level, the Republican Party is at death’s door.

Yet one already sees the same physicians writing prescriptions for the same drugs that have been killing the GOP since W’s dad got the smallest share of the vote by a Republican candidate since William Howard Taft in 1912.

In ascertaining the cause of the GOP’s critical condition, let us use Occam’s razor — the principle that the simplest explanation is often the right one.

Would the GOP wipeout in those heavily Catholic, ethnic, socially conservative, blue-collar bastions of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Ohio and Illinois, which Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan swept, have anything to do with the fact that the United States since 2000 has lost 6 million manufacturing jobs and 55,000 factories?

Where did all those jobs and factories go? We know where.

They were outsourced. And in the deindustrialization of America, the Republican Party has been a culpable co-conspirator.

Unlike family patriarch Sen. Prescott Bush, who voted with Barry Goldwater and Strom Thurmond against JFK’s free-trade deal, Bush I and II pumped for NAFTA, GATT, the WTO and opening America’s borders to all goods made by our new friends in the People’s Republic of China.

Swiftly, U.S. multinationals shut factories here, laid off workers, outsourced production to Asia and China, and brought their finished goods back, tax-free, to sell in the U.S.A.

Profits soared, as did the salaries of the outsourcing executives.

And their former workers? They headed for the service sector, along with their wives, to keep up on the mortgage payment, keep the kids in Catholic school and pay for the health insurance the family had lost.

Tuesday, these ex-Reagan Democrats came out to vote against some guy from Bain Capital they had been told in ads all summer was a big-time outsourcer who wrote in 2008, “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt!”

Yes, the simplest explanation is often the right one.

Republicans are also falling all over one another to express a love of Hispanics, after Mitt won only 27 percent of a Hispanic vote that is now 10 percent of the national vote.

We face demographic disaster, they are wailing. We must win a larger share of the Hispanic vote or we are doomed.

And what is the proposed solution to the GOP’s Hispanic problem, coming even from those supposedly on the realistic right?

Amnesty for the illegals! Stop talking about a border fence and self-deportation. Drop the employer sanctions. Make the GOP a welcoming party.

And what might be problematic about following this advice?

First, it will enrage populist conservatives who supported the GOP because they believed the party’s pledges to oppose amnesty, secure the border and stop illegals from taking jobs from Americans.

And in return for double-crossing these folks and losing their votes, what would be gained by amnesty for, say, 10 million illegal aliens?

Assume in a decade all 10 million became citizens and voted like the Hispanics, black folks and Asians already here. The best the GOP could expect — the Bush share in 2004 — would be 40 percent, or 4 million of those votes.

But if Tuesday’s percentages held, Democrats would get not just 6 million, but 7 million new votes to the GOP’s less than 3 million.

Thus, if we assume the percentages of the last three elections hold, the Democratic Party would eventually gain from an amnesty a net of between 2 and 4 million new voters.

Easy to understand why Democrats are for this. But why would a Republican Party that is not suicidally inclined favor it?

Still, the GOP crisis is not so much illegal as legal immigration. Forty million legal immigrants have arrived in recent decades. Some 85 percent come from Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East. Most arrived lacking the academic, language and labor skills to compete for high-paying jobs.

What does government do for them?

Subsidizes their housing and provides free education for their kids from Head Start through K-12, plus food stamps and school lunches, Pell Grants and student loans for college, Medicaid if they are sick, earned income tax credits if they work and 99 weeks of unemployment checks if they lose their job.

These are people who depend upon government.

Why would they vote for a party that is going to cut taxes they do not pay, but take away government benefits they do receive?

Again it needs be said. When the country looks like California demographically, it will look like California politically. Republicans are not whistling past the graveyard. They are right at the entrance.

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31 Responses to What Went Wrong

“Subsidizes their housing and provides free education for their kids from Head Start through K-12, plus food stamps and school lunches, Pell Grants and student loans for college, Medicaid if they are sick, earned income tax credits if they work and 99 weeks of unemployment checks if they lose their job.”

…apply to working class folks here in immigrant-free western Pennsylvania. If you’re unsure about how secure your job will be in a year, are you really going to vote for someone more likely to cut unemployment benefits?

Oh and there was this….and all that it implies about who Romney is and what he thinks:
“There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it — that that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what. … These are people who pay no income tax. … [M]y job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.”

This is the MOST sensible postmortem yet. I swear, I am going to strangle the next “Conservative” who thinks NAFTA, GATT, CAFTA, etc. were good for America or that widespread amnesty of illegals will help Republicans in ANY way electorally.

This is the most succinct explanation for Romney’s defeat that I have yet seen. Another point (not mentioned in this blog) is that when the public has to choose between 2 unpopular candidates (as both clearly were in this election), it is the incumbent who usually wins.

@ Nicholas N. – You are correct in your assertion that working people deserve the best social safety net that our government can provide, especially when that government has been so heavily complicit in helping employers to export American jobs (and whole industries) to Third World countries. But we need to consider the other side of the coin: employers, with the blessing of our government, are importing cheap foreign labor to take jobs that they cannot yet outsource.

I would bet a pound to a penny that if Western Pennsylvania had lots of jobs, it would not be immigrant-free for long. So, in addition to the problem of providing tax-paid subsidies to immigrants, I don’t see how we can justify the additional job competition they pose for struggling American workers.

And the idea that they are here to perform “jobs Americans won’t do” if refuted by the fact that Americans are doing those very same jobs in areas of the country that are not yet saturated with cheap immigrant labor.

I agree that NAFTA, etc. have had the effects that you are describing. However, Republicans need not adopt protectionism in response. The major issues driving the “de-capitalization” of America are massive state regulation that makes our labor rates uncompetitive (e.g., minimum wage) and a Federal Reserve System that destroys people’s savings so that the average blue collar worker can no longer support a family. Correct these issues and free trade becomes a blessing as goods and services become more affordable (rather than less) over time.

Mitt Romney could not tell a spell-binding camp fire story if his life depended on it.

From Romney, it was sound bites, platitudes, and generalities (not a compelling story).

Romney, with a background that stunk of hostility or ,at best, indifference to white working class Americans, was Mr. Corporation — the one who fired you, lowered your wages, or made you suffer the indignity of training your foreign replacement workers, while the CEO’s got huge bonuses. Yes, wages (purchasing power) for the working-class have been drifting down via a U. S. Chamber of Commerce mentality in the Republican Party (and the Democratic Party, for that matter, too).

Yes, outsourcing & offshoring, Globalist tools for the Elite, were personified by Romney — despite throw-away lines by Romney to the contrary — people can smell a mile away the difference between a throw-away line and real conviction.

(But the Elite think they are so smart and working class are so dumb — this is nothing but arrogance.)

Many white working-class simply didn’t believe Romney or believe in his life story — being a corporate raider.

Too many flip-flops eventually go to character and trustworthiness.

The Elite opinion makers who push for amnesty or “immigration reform” are Globalist tools.

The statistics make clear, a deficit in Latino voting didn’t cost Romney the election; a deficit in white working-class voting did cost Romney the election.

So, three things cost the election.

1. White working-class voters didn’t come out for Romney in a high enough percentage (even though he did win the white vote).

2. Globalist so-called “free trade” as a generic position hurt Romney particularly, based on his background — BAIN!
(See number #1 above.)

3. Romney was not just the wrong candidate, but a bad candidate to connect to white working-class voters — or working-class voters, regardless of race.

The pundits and elite who push for amnesty & comprehensive immigration reform are wrong. It would destroy the Republican Party. (Charles Krauthammer is absolutely wrong — notice neocons pushing amnesty.)

I honestly believe the message that reaches & connects with white working-class voters can also reach a threshold of hispanics & an increasing number of blacks.

It’s called economic nationalism and it is the antithesis of the U. S. Chamber of Commerce globalism.

A set of policies resulting in rising wages (purchasing power) and factories opening in America, with entry level jobs that can lead to advancement over the course of a career, can win the U. S. presidency.

But offshoring, declinging wages, and amnesty are the death knell for the Republican Party.

Who stands for that? Globalists, the U. S. Chamber of Commerce, and Neoconservatives, which was associated with Mitt Romney by too many white working-class Americans.

(Frankly, there is a message which connects with working-class Americans, across the board, regardless of race — that’s the secret — and, most important, in agreement with historic Republican Party principles. There really is a message that can connect with the majority of all Americans, a Republican Message. The problem is that the Establishment of the Republican Party does not stand for that message and neither did Mitt Romeny — and a majority of working-class Americans knew it.)

Once again Pat nails it. I would add another factor however. About 10 years ago in dicussion I brought up the S&L bailouts to my business partner, a staunch Republican, who replied that I needed to get over that. However the deal then was the same deal as our recent bailouts. We privatize profits and we socialize risk. This is not a free market or anyhting like it. Not only that, this is a nation where you can work hard and play by the rules for your entire life and still lose everything you have to people who are in a position to game the system. In this case, corporations are indeed people too.

From the S&Ls to Enron to Wall Street, we have a crony corporate welfare system that institutionalizes gains for the elite at the expense of the rest of us. Much has been made of how socialism kills incentive. Check out the Real Clear Politics article on the case of the missing white voters. The biggest demographic shift was not the number of nonwhites who showed up, but the number of whites who stayed home. I submit that these people had no incentive to vote, given what their choices were.

As a “social conservative/economic liberal” (yes we exist), I have a long standing affection for Uncle Pat.

His analysis of the loss of the Reagan Democrats might even be right.

However, I like to call his quixotic views on protectionism “libertarianism in one country”.

The time when we could play the free market game while safely ensconced in the borders created by protectionist legislation , protected by oceans and communications lag, is gone. It was the rhetoric of Reagan, Hayek, Friedman and all the other free-market prophets that led us here-abetted by technological change.

When you accept the logic of the market over all, you lose any coherent claim to protectionism as a viable strategy.

Rank and file Republicans were not always disciples of Rand and von Mises.

As a social conservative, Pat Buchanan knows that the family–the core of society–cannot survive in conditions of an untrammeled free market.

Pat,Reagan was as big,if not a bigger,free trader than Bush 1 or 2. Romney actually talked a tougher line(foolishly I might add)on China than Obama. He also signed a certain immigration bill(remember it,as you werein his administration when it happened)in 1986.
As for the auto bailout,Reagan would have opposed that too. BTW,was it not a Republican president(Bush)who inititated it?

timwinston doesn’t get the message when he says the problem is massive state regulation that makes our labor rates uncompetitive (e.g., minimum wage). He clearly advocates the full libertarian model. So how can a blue collar worker live on the wages paid in say Indonesia? And why should he? Pat is right as usual. Protection is the way to go, it is the policy that made America strong and prosperous. It is also the policy that made every other developed country strong and prosperous see Bad Samaritans Ho Joong Chang ,
Bloomsbury , a book every conservative should read.

I’m sure that you know the situation in W. Pennsylvania, but the facts are that immigrant households at a rate about 50% higher than native-born Americans. Among Mexican immigrant headed households, for example, 72% get some sort of federal benefits.

At Rossbach: “The best social safety net the government can provide”? Governments provide absolutely nothing sir, only the taxpayers do and usually/always when the government does it a minimum of what a third gets thrown away in waste/fraud/mismanagement?

Madison obviously understood this. Why do you think he said that charity is no part of the legislative process? Why was he adamant that he couldn’t find the article in the Constitution that allowed “benevolence” spending?

Have we, principled “conservatives” now decided that that Madison no longer applies? Are we finally ceding that the Founders were just flat wrong?

Do so and we’re finished. Do the “be like the other guy just a little less” game, and the electorate will pick the real thing every time. Wasn’t that MR after all? He and Ryan weren’t serious about the budget. Balance it 28 years from now? That wasn’t serious. Or, on Medicare, well we’re not going to touch any of you baby boomers? Well it’s insolvent folks TODAY folks. How serious was he? No wonder why they lost. Throw in a healthy dose of let’s go out and save the rest of the world neocon imperialism and frankly why was the margin so little?

The Founders’ principles are still valid. Can we just find someone who really believes them and can sell them? The last three, Bush, McCain, and now MR didn’t believe the stuff, the next guy better.

Hmm, and who is paying all that money into the superPACs for Romney and other Republicans? The same corporations that want more free-trade, no protection of the environment, no raise of minimum wage, etc. He’s essentially bought (so is Obama). If you aren’t bought, you’re not getting enough money to make you a viable candidate. So, perhaps real campaign finance reform is the only way to get us to a point where we can attempt to address real issues and not be governed by corporate interests.

Let’s see. Romney lost by a bit over 3 million votes in the popular count.

Over 1 million went to John Huntsman (whether gestures of ineffective principled protest and/or vanity is irrelevant in the wash).

About 75% of the Jewish vote went for Obama, with a majority of the African-American and Hispanic votes went for BHO, but one hopes the first group continues to naively confound and fall for the Democratic promise of libertinage with their hope for a guarantee that Jews will be permitted to pursue their liberty as the enduring ‘other’. The majorities of the latter 2 groups, more simply, merely desire unearned status and benefits drained from the common good by whatever means attained through the instilling of envy in their hearts.

We also, supposedly have many ‘Christians’ who would not vote for Romney because he was Mormon.

And then there was the incompetency of the Romney campaign leaders, even leading to Orca wallowing on the beach, and Romney’s historical baggage, which could have been compensated for, had he and others sufficiently compensated with the right rhetorical emphases.

One can dispute NAFTA, GATT, and the WTO, but again, is this because one wishes to disavow that we live in a new century of instantaneous exchange of goods and a world market, which is actuality; or does one disagree with those devices because one failed to obtain lawful power and influence to influence how those things were established, their objectives defined, and how they continue to be implemented? If the former, one needs to deal with reality. If the latter, one still needs to deal with reality.

The world is always changing. If the principles of the Constitution and its original amendments the founders elucidated are valid, they ought be applicable and operative in any new context and set of dynamics.

One doesn’t need a ‘grand narrative’ lamenting the lost Arcadia of past eras; one needs daring new thinking and courage concerning what those principles imply and how they can remain as guiding operatives in this republic’s psyche.

Grand narratives tend to downplay simple specifics that point to this or that failure or cause which have preceded an event or action. And in the end, it is the truth that is in the details, not the devil, which is why the so-called principle of economical explanation was part and parcel of the common patrimony of thinkers who strove to understand causes and effect who long preceded William Ockham.

But let us relish the moment and join all ideological revolutionaries who would either permit the demise of, or actively destroy, what is good in the name of attaining what they envision as the optimal or perfect or best.

“He also signed a certain immigration bill(remember it,as you werein his administration when it happened)in 1986.”

Yes, but HW Bush got zero benefit from that in 1988 — he actually got a lower share of the ‘Latino’ vote than Romney did. And the Gipper, a great lover of folksy wisdom, would undoubtedly say ‘fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me’ about this second, 4 times larger, attempt at amnesty.

Oh, and Reagan did bail out Chrysler, and I believe signed local content type laws.

@Nathan – Rubbish. What you suggest isn’t conservatism; it’s madness. If Madison lived in the 21st century he would understand that a social safety net is needed to provide sufficient economic stability in an industrial society to ensure social peace during hard times. It is impossible to believe that our Founding Fathers were such fools that they would attempt to apply 18th century economic remedies to 21st century conditions.

Social-contract capitalism is what made the US great in the 20th century. Its abandonment by a corrupt and unrepresentative government is what is destroying it now.

As of this evening November 9, three days after the election Obama has 61,476,182 popular votes for 50.5%.
In the 2004 election Bush got 62,040,610 popular votes for 50.7%. The Republicans also had control of both the Senate and the House. We know what happened in 2006 and 2008. The Republicans also picked up one Governorship in 2012 and now have 30 compared to the Democrats 19. The Democrats suffered one of the worst midterm defeats in 2010.
In 2012 the Republicans could have actually picked up a Senate seat even given the loss of Massachusetts.
They lost in Indiana and Missouri where Romney won easily, not because the candidates were bad, but because they were idiots. If they had merely been bad they still probably would have won. Republicans lost in Montana because a Libertarian candidate took enough votes from the Republican.
If they have enough sense, which is debatable, they will coach future candidates not to sound like complete morons when answering questions about abortion in the case of rape and incest. They also should nominate more libertarian leaning candidates in some western states.
No matter the party in power, circumstances will force them to cut social programs just like Europe is doing. Party affiliation has changed in the past, Blacks used to be Republican and the south solidly Democrat, and it can and will change again.
It’s totally ridiculous to think the Republican Party is destined for extinction or even irrelevance unless they start behaving like Democrats and vice versa.

When the country looks like California demographically, it will look like California politically.

And California’s GOP is functionally dead for the same reason the national GOP is dying: Competence.

The GOP first showed its incompetence when its first action after replacing Willie Brown’s iron grip was to recall itself into the minority. Doris Allen was a lifelong Republican and an excellent legislator, but she worked with Democrats and thus was ideologically impure. Ideology trumped competence.

Then the GOP recalled Grey Davis, promising to balance the budget and put CA on the right track again. By the end of the Schwarzenegger era the GOP was demonstrated to be unserious about balanced budget and in a thrall to the fetish of tax cuts at all times and in every place. Infrastructure was crumbling (except our prisons) and schools were getting worse.

At a national level we see the same thing: incompetence in governing. The George W. Bush era was a low water mark for competence. The GOP owned every branch of government and managed to botch everything except passing tax cuts. Afghanistan, Iraq, Katrina, Medicare D. A balanced budget was never in their interests, nor was simply serving the people of the United States of America in a competent manner.

The story that the GOP loses because so many are dependent upon government is lovely, but false. The GOP loses because it is not fit to govern.

It was a Republican leader, Tom DeLay, who said “Nothing is more important in the face of war than tax cuts.” How about actually winning the war? Nope. Tax cuts.

That’s the problem the GOP has, and until it realizes that it has an addiction to tax cuts that prevents it from seeing anything else clearly it will not return to the competent party of Eisenhower or Nixon or Reagan or H.W. Bush.

Chris Christie among others said specifically that the GOP was going to touch the third rail (soc sec and Medicare) and by choosing Ryan, Romney seemed clearly to do so. So the elephant got electrocuted and now all the media and establishment say it wasn’t anything to do with the third rail. It was something else like immigration (which no one really emphasized) or maybe it was ball lightning.

I hate to waste anyone’s time or even the cyber-ink, but obviously, I should have keyed in that over 1 million votes went to Johnson and not Huntsman.

It is only right to add that had the so-called GOP not disinfranchised Ron Paul and his supporters, and not treated them stupidly, arrogantly and unjustly at the convention (through Priebus, Boehner, et alii), Romney likely could have been the new President (in spite of his flaws), and with Ron Paul and other libertarians in his cabinet could have averted the pending disasters we face.

But the Republican establishment, and one presumes Romney as well, were, and are, too much in love with their plutocratic status, too pusillanimous, too power hungry, and too petty to behave differently.

“By the end of the Schwarzenegger era the GOP was demonstrated to be unserious about balanced budget and in a thrall to the fetish of tax cuts at all times and in every place. Infrastructure was crumbling (except our prisons) and schools were getting worse.”

I don’t recall Schwarzenegger tax cuts. I do recall a campaign against pubic sector unions, and Republicans fighting tax increases.

At any rate, you’ve got your tax increase. It will go exactly zero to raise the educational performance of California public schools. Our NAEP scores are now down among Alabama, Mississippi, and DC. The root cause in all those places, and California, has everything to do with Demographics.

The comments to this column are whats wrong with typical complaints about election results. That is The Republican Party needs the right candidates to apply true conservative values to the Presidency or to the Congress in order to straighten out America’s fiscal and economic woes. When,in reality,once the socialist genie was let out of the bottle any return to fiscal sanity was made impossible until the genie was stuffed back into that bottle. The hard work is to do the stuffing. In other words,unless there is a drastic cutback in the American Federal Welfare State (Social Security,medicare/medicaid etc.) plus a discontinuance of an American Empire/Warfare State plus a return to sound debt free money nothing will change. You cannot,over the long run,cheat the laws of economics. You can only slow those laws down by “kicking the can down the road.” The problem is we’ve run out of road. With that said,neither the Democrats or Republicans are willing to take on the challenges of dismantling or even cutting back the New Deal and the Great Society programs which have wrecked havoc with the American Constitution and property rights to the point that eventually America will be bankrupted into a 2nd class nation. Despite the loss of jobs due to off shoring and other reasons when one looks objectively at America’s economic base there are plenty of good job opportunities that go begging. Yet,people would rather sit home and collect a check. It seems as though the spirit of the American Yankee Trader died decades ago with the onslaught of the American Welfare State. Only and until the socialist genie is stuffed back into the bottle will America be positively turned around

While foreign policy usually ends up as a low impact thing, Romney would mean a near certainity of war with Iran (under Obama, war with Iran is a 50/50 thing), such a war would hurt the USA more than any of Romneys other policies could possibly help it.

One should also add that the current lack of US industry also has another reason: A very expensive education system resulting in a not too well educated workforce.
Given the incredible increase in education costs that are borne by students etc (which are higher, by orders of magnitude, then in a majority of the USAs foreign competitors).

The utterly deficient health care system also result in workforce that is somehwat more unhealthy than that of the European or East Asian competition.

Last but not least, the increasingly uncompetetive US companies appear to rely more and more on the threats of the US marine corps and the CIA to gain contracts and contacts, which to an extent was what Great Britain was doing prior to World War 1. Great Britain rapidly lost its economic preponderance in foreign markets to the USA because the USA simply offered better deals with by far less strings attached. Today, the USA has become the British Empire, while China and Russia, China much more so than the more interventionist Russians, are industrial powerhouses that trade a good deal “fairer” then their competition.

It should first be noted that deindustrialization really hit its peak on Ronald Reagan’s watch, not John F. Kennedy’s, nor George Herbert Walker Bush’s.

A whole generation of enterpreneurs (those the Republican leadership venerates under the code word “job creators”) rose to economic domination following the script written by the founder of Nike as an MBA thesis: American companies could make lots of money moving production to south-east Asia and then selling to an American market at American prices. China was the biggest field, once the world’s largest remaining communist party decided to pimp its working class to amass the capital to become a world power, but it wasn’t the first.

Karl Rove’s handling of George W. Bush has always impressed me as a real-life Manchurian Candidate scenario. His mission was to find a clueless, baby-faced business failure, make him president of the United States, then stop amassing budget surpluses or paying down the national debt, instead mortgaging the USA to Chinese bankers. Rove performed his mission brilliantly.

A Republican Party that is not suicidally inclined will have to find ways to appeal to people who are here, are voting, are citizens, whether any given individual likes the demographics or not. We’ve been through this with German, Irish, Jewish, Italian, Slavic and many other immigrant waves. Barack Obama is doing a good job of getting control of our borders. Integrating those who are already here is equally imperative if we are not to degenerate into the nation the author prematurely ascribes us to be.

“And California’s GOP is functionally dead for the same reason the national GOP is dying: Competence.”

I agree this is part of it. The GOP used to be the party of a calm, reasoned approach to problems. It was the party of thinkers, while the Democrats tended to make their case based on emotion. When you wanted something done, you went for the Republican.

That is not the case anymore. The GOP appeals more to emotion – specifically fear – than to intellect. The narrative has been basically “we’ll save you from the scary black ‘socialist’ with the ‘Muslim-sounding’ name.” Detailed, realistic plans to fix the economy took a backseat to fear-mongering about how America would be “destroyed” if Obama got a second term.

Yet competence is only part of the problem. The other part is indeed the shifting demographics, and Pat’s column illustrates the attitude towards Latinos, Asians, and immigrants in general that will sink the GOP. Simply put, you cannot hope to win these voters if you characterize them as a “problem” to be solved, accuse them of collectively bellying up to the government trough, and subtly (or as Pat sometimes does, openly) wail about the demise of “White America.”